According to LA Weekly’s Music Blog, some fans of Nevada’s notorious Burning Man Festival are outraged out the decision recently announced in the Burning Man Newsletter that tickets would now be available through new lottery system. Organizers cite the change as a solution to the ticketing issues of last year, when the first ever sell-out of Burning Man gave greedy scalpers the opportunity for outrageous mark-ups, and is “really just a way to manage the flow of tickets” as told to the Huffington Post by Burning Man organizer Marion Goodell.
Photo Credit: Ryan Stabile
It works like this: fans select a price tier and enter a valid credit card number to enter the lottery on the festival’s website. There will be three lotteries. The first round of tickets went on sale from November 28-Devember 11, during which time 3,000 tickets were made available at $420. In January, 40,000 will be up for grabs, and fans will have once last chance in March to get the remaining 10,000.
New fans are worried this system may exclude some members of their camps who aren’t selected in the lottery, and that scalpers will still strangle the market, while long time burners who have contributed to the growth of the festival may also be left out.
Promoters insist that only a small percentage of people will be left out using this new method, and point to the fact that they are trying to appeal to the Federal Bureau of Land Management to allow the maximum capacity to be increased from 50,000 to 70,000 people by 2016.
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